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The driver of a car that was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, was shocked when a passing motorist rolled down the window and shouted at him, “Dirty donkey.”
He was even more surprised when he looked up to see that the insult came from a woman. A woman driving a car. A woman driving a car without wearing the obligatory hijab.
That was Laila Haidari, who runs a popular cafe in Kabul that allows men and women to dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf, and uses the profits to fund a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts.
Nearly everyone addresses Ms. Haidari, 39, as “Nana,” or “Mom,” and her supporters describe her as the “mother of a thousand children,” after the number of Afghan addicts she has reportedly saved.
Now, Ms. Haidari plans to start a popular uprising against the continuing peace talks with the Taliban.
“Guys, the Taliban are coming back,” she said one day recently to a mixed group of diners at her restaurant, Taj Begum, which has been subjected to virulent attacks in the local media that have all but compared it to a brothel.
“We have to organize,” she told her customers. “I hope to find 50 other women who will stand up and say, ‘We don’t want peace.’ If the Taliban comes back, you will not have a friend like me, and there will be no restaurant like Taj Begum.”
Ms. Haidari’s Kabul restaurant, Taj Begum, where men and women dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf.
Ms. Haidari’s Kabul restaurant, Taj Begum, where men and women dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf.CreditKiana Hayeri for The New York Times
Her nearly always crowded restaurant, on the banks of the sewage-drenched Kabul River, is named after a 15th-century warrior princess from Herat who helped rule a vast kingdom, a rare example of female power from that time.
Ms. Haidari is as unusual in her own age.
While most women’s activists in Afghanistan have been Western-financed and supported, she has insisted on organizing her political activity herself, and on her own terms.
“We need to change our own men and our own families first,” Ms. Haidari said in an interview. “Don’t think of me as a victim, like so many of our women in public life seem to be. I’m not going to sit across from the Taliban wearing hijab begging for my rights.”
Few women’s activists here challenge patriarchal social norms to the degree Ms. Haidari does, and those who do, tend to do it quietly and politely. They also tend to come from Western-educated, liberal families who support their rebellion.
Ms. Haidari does it loudly and often rudely, and comes from a religiously conservative family who married her at 12 to a mullah two decades older.
“Ever since age 12, I feel like I’ve been in a boxing ring,” she said. “Back then I didn’t know that child marriage was something unjust, even though I had this feeling I was being raped every night by a full-grown man, and that was wrong.”
Her family had fled to Iran as refugees, and Ms. Haidari bore the mullah three children there. Her husband allowed her to take religious classes, but she secretly began studying general subjects and eventually went to an Iranian university, where she earned a degree in filmmaking.
Ms. Haidari divorced her husband — under Islamic law, he kept the children — and returned to Afghanistan, where she discovered her brother Hakim living under a bridge in Kabul, a heroin addict. She promised God she would open a treatment center for addicts if she could save him, and she did, using the Narcotics Anonymous 12-step method, and a dose of tough love.
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“We are face to face with an ideology, not a group of people,” she said. “They believe that women are defined as the second gender and you can’t change that ideology, so I have no hope for Taliban talks.”
Ms. Haidari’s three children, now aged 16 to 21, have fled to Germany from Iran, and while she has not been able to visit them, she is in touch by WhatsApp.
Her work is for them, she said.
“I should have something to tell my own children and my grandchildren, when they ask, ‘What did you do when the Taliban came?’”
May 7, 2016 ---New video has emerged online of a woman being publically executed by the Taliban in Jowzjan Province, Afghanistan. Contradicting reports say that the woman was accused of either killing her husband or committing adultery in the province, which borders Tajikstan in the country's northern frontier.Here is an analysis of the current situation from Brookings:
She was reportedly convicted in an informal court and the images will bring back memories of the 1990s when public executions of women was commonplace during the Taliban's rule of Afghanistan. In the past year the public executions, including stonings and beatings, of women have taken place.
The video was reportedly shot in March or April in Khanqa village in the Aqcha district. The footage shows the woman being forced to kneel in a desert before she is shot in the back of the head.
A Taliban militant, who has his face covered with a scarf shoots the woman with an AK-47 rifle after the verdict was declared. The Taliban and local officials have not commented on the execution as yet.
During the 1990s, the Taliban would take woman convicted of adultery to the main stadium in the Afghan capital of Kabul where the public would be forced to watch executions.
In November last year, a young woman was stoned to death in Ghor province in central Afghanistan after being accused of adultery. In a 28-second clip, the woman was heard praying as several men throw rocks at her head while a crowd of onlookers watch in silence.
After intense negotiations with the Taliban, the chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad announced yesterday that core elements of a deal to end the U.S. counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan have been basically agreed. The disclosed core elements are not surprising: The Taliban promises Afghanistan’s territory will not be used by international terrorist groups and the United States agrees to withdraw its forces.
However, many difficult questions remain: How fast will the United States withdraw its military forces—in as few months as the Taliban wants (militarily infeasible and strategically unsound for the United States and Afghanistan), or between 16 to 24 months as the United States seeks? Will there be a residual U.S. military force, of say 1,000 soldiers, to protect the U.S. embassy, which—wink, wink, with the Taliban’s permission—will have the capacity to conduct limited counterterrorism strikes, something the Obama administration had contemplated in 2014? Will the Taliban finally agree to negotiate with the Afghan government, as President Ashraf Ghani, very leery of the U.S.-Taliban negotiations, has been insisting? Will the Taliban agree to a ceasefire while it negotiates with the Afghan government? And will the U.S. military remain in Afghanistan (and at what strength) until the agreement is concluded? If not, the U.S.-Taliban deal will merely be a fig leaf for U.S. departure while the Afghan government and people are left on their own to face the Taliban.